Eli Lilly's Pemetrexed Therapy Claims Survive Challenge At PTAB

The Federal Circuit's decision in Eli Lilly & Co. v. Teva Parenteral Medicines, Inc., 845 F.3d 1357 (Fed. Cir. 2017) attracted much attention for applying the theory of divided infringement in the context of pharmaceutical therapeutic regimen claims.  Before the Federal Circuit decision, a scrum of petitioners successfully petitioned for IPR of the Lilly patent, alleging that the claims were obvious in view of a combination of references that included prior art considered by the court in the litigation. Our previous post highlighted the potential for inconsistent results that AIA trials may present relative to district court actions concerning the same patent.  In Neptune Generics, LLC. et al., v. Eli Lilly & Co., Case No. IPR2016-00237, Paper 84 (P.T.A.B. Oct. 5, 2017), the Board issued an 88-page final written decision determining that the petitioners failed to establish that the challenged claims were unpatentable, preserving Lilly's patent position for one of